Aged Madoff Investors Wonder About the Rest of Their Days - Edith and Thomas V. Liccardi

Aged Madoff Investors Wonder About the Rest of Their Days

By JAMES BARRON
Published: January 7, 2009
Thomas V. Liccardi knew all about how people should prepare for retirement. He was an accountant who specialized in tax returns for estates — often dealing with people whose elderly parents had died, usually after long and comfortable lives.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Edith and Thomas V. Liccardi had a $2.7 million balance at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. They fear it is all lost.
He himself kept on working through his 60s and his 70s and into his 80s, doing a few tax returns every year and helping younger accountants he knew in White Plains.

He had planned for his own retirement, of course. By last year, even after two heart attacks and a serious stroke, Mr. Liccardi, 86, was confident that he had no financial worries: he had become a millionaire, wealthy enough to afford $130,000 a year for assisted-living accommodations in a home for the elderly and the round-the-clock health aides whom he and his wife depend on.

The computer-generated financial statements he received every month showed that he had $2.7 million, an impressive increase from the $400,000 he had originally invested with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, back in the late 1990s.

“My whole life was wrapped up around that money,” he said. “I thought I could pay the bills for the next 10 years.”

Of the Madoff firm’s 8,000 customers, many will surely survive financially — universities, foundations, some who served on their boards or were regulars on the charity circuits in Manhattan and Palm Beach. But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of victims who poured their life savings into what turned out to be apparently phantom accounts.

This is no consolation to Mr. Liccardi, who now is wondering where he and his wife will live out their days. “I’m a small fry compared to most of the other people,” Mr. Liccardi said on Tuesday, “but I’m hurt more. I can’t work anymore or anything.”

Sitting in their little room at Fountains at RiverVue — the second door on the right, past the room marked “utility,” past the sign for the hair salon, down a hallway with prints of golfers and golf clubs and Grand Central Terminal—his wife, Edith, 84, interrupted. “He’s a nervous wreck,” Mrs. Liccardi, who had a small stroke last year and uses a walker, said of her husband.

With the Madoff money gone, Mr. Liccardi fears that he and his wife cannot afford to stay at the Fountains, where they have lived for a year and a half.

They might eventually be eligible for Medicaid, to cover their second-most-important expense, after the monthly fees to the Fountains for their room and their meals: what they pay their home health aides. A spokeswoman for the state Health Department said that generally, Medicaid will cover 24-hour care if it has been ordered by a doctor as medically necessary.

April K. Johnson, the executive director of the home, in Tuckahoe, N.Y., said no decision had been made about what to do if the Liccardis run out of money. “We’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it,” she said. “I’m definitely willing to work with him.”

Mr. Liccardi went to Ms. Johnson to negotiate a reduction of their room and board almost as soon as he heard about the scandal — and he heard about it when a former associate called.

“He said, ‘Tom, Madoff’s picture is on the front page as a rip-off artist,’ ” Mr. Liccardi said. “I just about fell to the floor. It was impossible. I had so much faith.”

And Mr. Liccardi had been a reluctant convert.

A veteran of the Army Signal Corps in World War II — bronchitis kept him from shipping out with his company when it received orders for Europe — he set up an accounting practice in the Bronx and in Westchester County after he graduated from Manhattan College. Over the years. he was careful with his money, and he counseled his clients to be careful with theirs.

His first encounter with the Madoff firm involved a longtime client’s tax return that Mr. Liccardi was preparing. He did not believe the figures the firm had reported to the Internal Revenue Service, year after year.

“When I saw a 25 percent return,” he said, “I said the returns sounded much too good. Something sounded wrong.” Mr. Liccardi’s client suggested that Mr. Liccardi visit the Madoff firm’s office, where he met Mr. Madoff. It was an encounter that would change his life, though not, it is now clear, in the way he long imagined.

“He impressed me very much, as he did everyone else, and there were banks of computers and people running all over the place,” Mr. Liccardi said. “I thought this had to be legitimate because you couldn’t employ that kind of staff without money.”

Mr. Liccardi was convinced that the Madoff firm was making the money for its clients that it was reporting to the I.R.S. — so convinced that he decided to invest the $400,000 he had saved over the years. He said that except for their house, in Yonkers, and some savings bonds his wife had inherited from her mother, “that was everything.” In 2006, they sold the house. He put the $400,000 profit from the sale in their Madoff account, believing it had been invested safely. “I wasn’t taking any chances,” he said.

In 2007, he cashed in the savings bonds, which generated more than $60,000 in cash toward the year’s expenses. He had counted on withdrawals from the Madoff account to pay for this year and beyond.

“I don’t know where we’re going to get the money to continue here,” he said. He said they have less than $100,000 in bank accounts — not enough to make it through 2009.

Their two grown daughters live in other states, and he said it would not be realistic to move in with either one. “I thought I’d be able to help them with the Madoff fund I had,” he said. “I can’t do it now.”